City of Glass 61 - (EastSideStory)

Done - the big move was made this morning. An extension of the horizontals on the left and repainting between the lines to bring more precision. A new green line coming up from bottom centre and a bit of colour tuning and tidying up. Colour proportions sublime...a balance beween the small coloured rectangles on the left and the ripped paint on the right. Drips that could be avenues. A painting from a story that has its own story and it's own language. It's a book that doesn't close - it's a painting.

I seem to have spent more time thinking than doing over the past couple of days with this pair of 'open/book' paintings, a direct reference to the source for the series.* In this piece, the idea is to integrate the grid of the book (the ruled lines of Quinn's notebook) with the grid of the streets of the Upper East Side. The other painting will be the streets of the Upper West Side, the two locations, of course, significant in Paul Auster's story. In both paintings, the horizontals- the streets and ruled-lines-will be prominent, which is starting to happen in the top-left of the painting above, where Central Park is defined by the absence of verticals. Embedded in the grid is the route of Quinn's journey home when he finally runs out of money and has to abandon his surveillance of the apartment on E69th St. All a bit raw and clunky at the moment but I like the way the curve straddles the canvas divide. Is it a painting?/is it a map?/ is it a book? I can see the right-side covered with a sheet of beautiful pale-blue tomorrow, leaving a trace of the line of the curve, and the extended horizontal lines cutting through.

An earlier idea was to have Central Park as the negative space between the canvases...(below)